▲ President Trump
The Donald Trump administration appears increasingly pressed as its push to tighten voter verification faces legal roadblocks, following earlier restrictions on mail-in voting.
The administration has filed emergency appeals with the Supreme Court seeking to overturn lower court rulings against both measures, a move widely seen as tied to expected struggles in the November midterm elections less than two months away.
On September 8, local time, the U.S. Department of Justice filed an emergency appeal with the Supreme Court asking to allow the Department of Homeland Security's Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements (SAVE) program to be used for verifying voter rolls.
The program is a database that has been used to verify the citizenship and immigration status of applicants to ensure that undocumented immigrants do not receive public benefits or administrative services in the U.S.
It is not a database built for verifying individual voters.
Through an executive order, President Trump added Social Security data to the database, enabling states to use it to purge potential non-citizens from voter rolls on a large scale.
After lower courts in the first and second instances issued injunctions halting the use of the executive order on the grounds of privacy violations and procedural breaches, the Justice Department appealed to the conservative-leaning Supreme Court, arguing that it threatens the integrity of the upcoming election.
Currently pending before the Supreme Court is another emergency appeal filed by the Justice Department against lower court blocks on President Trump's executive order heavily restricting mail-in voting across states through the U.S. Postal Service.
The order required states to submit lists of voters who receive mail-in ballots, and mandated that the Postal Service deliver ballots only to individuals on those lists.
In response, 24 states challenged the new Postal Service regulations.
The tightened voter verification and mail-in voting restrictions, both awaiting Supreme Court rulings, were included in an executive order issued by President Trump last March.
A Supreme Court decision on the new mail-in voting regulations is expected as early as September 9.
President Trump's executive order at the time was chosen as a workaround after he concluded that passing the Safeguard American Voter Eligibility (SAVE) Act—which he considered a winning card for the midterm elections—would be virtually impossible in the federal legislature.
The SAVE Act centers on mandating proof of citizenship for voter registration, requiring photo identification to vote, purging non-citizens from voter rolls, and essentially banning absentee and mail-in voting.
President Trump is believed to have sought to pass the bill to block low-income voters with immigrant backgrounds, who tend to lean toward the Democratic Party, from casting ballots. While the bill passed the House, it remains stalled in the Senate.
The Associated Press noted last June that as it became clear the SAVE Act faced a rocky path in Congress, Trump bypassed congressional authority through his second executive order last March.
President Trump's claims that election outcomes have been distorted by votes from unqualified voters serve simultaneously as a political strategy and an extension of his belief championing "rigged election conspiracy theories."
In a national address last July, President Trump stated that during the 2020 presidential election, the FBI had detected cases in Michigan where individuals signed voter registration applications using someone else's name or submitted fraudulent registration applications targeting nonexistent people.
He also claimed that according to Department of Homeland Security investigations, 278,000 non-citizens were registered to vote, and that the scale would be much larger considering data that Democratic-leaning states refused to provide.
However, mainstream U.S. media outlets generally assess that while isolated instances of unqualified voting are occasionally discovered as Trump claims, the scale is not large enough to impact election outcomes.
(Photo: Getty Images)
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